Little Giant

Why Fan Obsession Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

By Meryl Rothstein

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XXV XXI reads the license plate on my family's car. It's not immediately evident that we have—gasp—a vanity plate, but anyone who stares at it long enough eventually asks what it means. "Yeah, it's kind of embarrassing," I'll say, desperate to avoid associations with the GR8 MOMs and the EZRIDERs out there.

But for every ten uninitiated observers there is one who gets it, and each "Wow, that's amazing" makes it worthwhile. XXV XXI, you see, refers to the twenty-fifth and twenty-first Super Bowls—the only two won by the New York Giants.

From September until January (if we're lucky and they make it to the play-offs), Sundays are about football. While other families are having Sunday brunch or sitting in church, we're prepping for the game, packing seat cushions, binoculars, and, if it's cold, blankets to cover our long johns and ski suits.

In many ways, I choose to partake in this obsession, grabbing the hot chocolate week after week and reading the sports section so I can keep up with my family. But in other ways, I was simply born into it.

Rookie Hazing

My brother was almost fourteen when I was born; my sister almost ten. Like all older siblings, they took advantage of the human toy they had been given. To my sister Lori, I was a Barbie doll to dress up and style with eyeliner and rouge for photo shoots. With my brother, though, I was a miniature football action figure. In one of our more complicated living-room moves, he'd play the quarterback and I'd play the running back. He'd fake a pass to me, then I'd magically morph into the receiver, fake out the imaginary defense and run down the room to catch the ball. My mother would sometimes act as the referee, but mostly as a pretext to protect the antique lamps we had established as goal posts.

This interest of ours is really all my father's doing. He went to his first Giants game his freshman year of college in 1958. Nearly fifty years later, he still remembers it: "It was the last game of the regular season against Cleveland. It was a fantastic game. Pat Summerall was their field goal kicker. It was snowing, and to win the game he kicked a 49-yard field goal in the snow. It was the cover story that week in Sports Illustrated: '49 Yards and the Foot.'" My dad became a season ticket holder in 1965, and he's probably missed no more than 40 games in those 40 years. An otherwise rational and somewhat reserved person, he can rattle off their starting defensive line since that 1958 season, knows who's injured at any moment and will offer his opinion on what effect it'll have on the team.

When I ask my mother why she has grown to love the Giants, she laughs, "Because Daddy told me to." She's only half joking. My father's passion for the team is infectious, so infectious that he got a five year-old girl to want to sit still for hours so she could watch this thing her father and siblings kept raving about.

But my father's passion alone would not be enough to get me to go to the stadium in New Jersey, lose feeling in my toes and watch a too frequently disappointing game every other Sunday for months.

There's also the unparalleled excitement of the game. There are so few of them in a football season that every one counts, and so few points scored that every drive counts. This intensity keeps you on the edge of your seat more than any sport I've seen. Apparently this excitement is called "eustress" to those who study this sort of thing, but I only know it as the thing that makes you impulsively jump to your feet, makes you throw your hand in the air, makes you yell even though you promised your mother you wouldn't because you're a loud little girl and you'd already damaged your vocal chords by the age of seven.

And then there's the "Family Motive," one of the main reasons, according to sexist demagogues, for women's interest in sports. As a child it was certainly one of mine. When you're eight and your sister is eighteen and your brother is twenty-two, you don't have much in common. When I was learning to spell, my sister was applying to colleges, my brother looking for a job. But we had the Giants. When they were at college, they'd call after games, and after talking about that catch, that sack or that terrible call, we'd talk about that class, that boy, or that thing that Mommy did.

For my father, too, it's been a way to get to know us better, a way to wean private information that usually gets an "Ugh, I don't want to talk about it" at the dinner table. Somehow, talking about my life isn't as painful in the car ride home from games (once we've finished listening to the post-game show on the radio, of course).

But I'm not thinking about family bonding when we're walking into Giants Stadium, with the smell of spilled beer, the sound of 70,000 cheering fans and the businessmen with absurdly painted red and blue faces. I am first and foremost a fan.

Playbook A La Rothstein

And there are some rules to being a Rothstein fan. You do not leave games early. Even if they're up by 20 or losing by 30, you don't head for the exit until there are four zeros on the clock. Once, but only once, my father and I left a game early, when I was six and sick. I apologized profusely because I knew he didn't like to leave before it was really over. But even then, my brother and sister, a bit unfeelingly, stayed until the end, taking the bus back to Port Authority in New York City.

"I take pride in being one of only ten thousand people left in the stadium," my sister said recently. "People leave at the beginning of the fourth quarter when there's less than a one touchdown difference? That's disgraceful."

"Why even bother coming to the game?" she added. "Be a Jets fan if that's the kind of fan you're going to be."

Which gets at another Rothstein rule. You may not like any other team. You must especially hate the other teams in the NFC East—the Redskins, the Cowboys and most of all the Eagles. You must also hate the New York Jets, who share the Giants' stadium, which is called—officially—Giants Stadium. You are not obligated to call their fans "dirty, drunk and crass," like my sister does, but if you do, it's OK, even accurate.

You must also accept the weather, no matter how extreme. For frigid games you will wear long johns, corduroys, a long sleeve shirt, a turtleneck, a winter coat, a hat, a scarf, glove liners, ski gloves, sock liners, ski socks and winter boots.

There's also the possibility of rain, for which we each have specifically purchased rain suits and boots. I once went to a Giants-Patriots game in Foxborough with my friends, who were impressed that I, the only girl, hadn't complained about the torrential downpour for which none of us had prepared. I didn't know that was an option.

If you can't make a game—absence from New York being the only acceptable reason—you will make your best effort to follow it. This may mean going to a bar in Providence when your dorm's limited cable doesn't pick it up, waking up at some ungodly hour while on family vacation in Thailand or sneaking a pocket radio into your cousin's wedding. And if you cannot do that, you will at least read the newspaper the next day and the post-game e-newsletter my father forwards every week.

The Family Roster

Then there are the variations on the Rothstein Fan. My father is the one with the facts, the one who actually reads the entire e-newsletter, the one who is the worst to talk to if things don't go our way. He truly treats a team success as a personal success and a team failure as a personal failure. Perhaps this explains the time he ran over a parking lot attendant's foot after a miserable game or the time he raised my allowance after a great one.

My mother's the literal fair weather fan, relinquishing her seat as soon as it drops below 50 degrees. She'll still watch every game, of course, but always from the safety of the living room. My brother shares my father's knowledge, but hasn't been as religious about coming to games.

My sister says that she and I are about "90% Daddy and 10% Mommy" when it comes to being fans. Our dedication comes from my father, as does our ability to hold our own when talking about Eli's arm, recent draft picks or Coughlin's play calls.

Then there is the perhaps embarrassing 10% we inherited from my mother, our passion for the "human interest" angle of the sport. We know that Dhani Jones had 118 tackles in 2003, but we also know that his parents are neurosurgeons and that he's into Shakespeare and we think that's adorable. We make up nicknames for players ("Tikilicious") and insist on calling every player from the tri-state area a "Hometown Hero." We know every word to the now defunct but once near-perfect Giants' theme song "Proud to Be." We make up songs of our own.

But as silly as our amateur songwriting is, my fandom has defined me in many ways. I like to think I am the only eighteen-year old girl who saw in football the subject of a rich and illuminating college essay.

While at college I can only go to a few games a year, and watching it on TV doesn't compare to the thrill of live games. But going back to New York after graduation will also mean going back to Giants Stadium. Around 2015 I should have some season tickets of my own; my dad put me on the waiting list for my tenth birthday, and about twenty years later I should be sitting in the stands, on the edge of my seat, hot chocolate in hand, ready to put XLIX on my own license plate.

Meryl Rothstein B'06 is five foot nothin', 100 and nothin' and has nary a speck of athletic ability.

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